When
I got back to Caltech, I asked some of the experimenters what the situation was with beta decay. I remember three guys, Hans Jensen,
Aaldert Wapstra, and Felix Boehm, sitting me down on a little stool, and starting to tell me all these facts: experimental results from other parts of the
country, and their own experimental results. Since I knew those guys, and how careful they were, I paid more attention to their results than to the
others. Their results, alone,
were not so inconsistent; it was all the others
plus
theirs.
Finally they get all this stuff into me, and they say, "The situation is so mixed up that even some of the things they've established for
years
are
being questioned--such as the beta decay of the neutron is S and T. It's so messed up. Murray says it might even be V and A."
I jump up from the stool and say, "Then I understand EVVVVVERYTHING!"
They thought I was joking. But the thing that I had trouble with at the Rochester meeting--the neutron and proton disintegration: everything fit
but
that, and if it was V and A instead of S and T,
that
would fit too. Therefore I had the whole theory!
That night I calculated all kinds of things with this theory. The first thing I calculated was the rate of disintegration of the muon and the neutron.
They should be connected together, if this theory was right,
by a certain relationship, and it was right to 9 percent. That's pretty close, 9 percent. It
should have been more perfect than that, hut it was close enough.
I went on and checked some other things, which fit, and new things fit, new things fit, and I was very excited. It was the first time, and the only
time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew. (Of course it wasn't true, but finding out later that at least Murray Gell-Mann--
and also Sudarshan and Marshak--had worked out the same theory didn't spoil my fun.)
The other things I had done before were to take somebody else's theory and improve
the method of calculating, or take an equation, such as the
Schrodinger Equation, to explain a phenomenon, such as helium. We know t he equation, and we know the phenomenon, but how does it work?
I thought about Dirac, who had his equation for a while--a new equation which told how an electron behaved-- and I had this new equation for
beta decay, which wasn't as vital as the Dirac Equation, but it was good. It's the only time I ever discovered a new law.
I called up my sister in New York to thank her for getting me to sit down and work through that paper by Lee
and Yang at the Rochester
Conference. After feeling uncomfortable and behind, now I was
in
; I had made a discovery, just from what she suggested. I was able to enter physics
again, so to speak, and I wanted to thank her for that. I told her that everything fit, except for the 9 percent.
I was very excited, and kept on calculating, and things that fit kept on tumbling out: they fit automatically, without a strain.
I had begun to forget
about the 9 percent by now, because everything else was coming out right.
I worked very hard into the night, sitting at a small table in the kitchen next to a window. It was getting later and later--about 2:00 or 3:00 AM.
I'm working hard, getting all these calculations packed solid with things that fit, and I'm thinking, and concentrating, and it's dark, and it's quiet . . .
when suddenly there's a TAC-TAC-TAC-TAC--loud, on the window. I look, and there's this
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